The term "Mesolithic art" refers
to all arts and crafts created between the end of the Paleolithic Ice
Age (10,000 BCE) and the beginning of farming, with its cultivation and
animal husbandry. The length of this interim "Mesolithic" period
varied region by region, according to how long it took for agriculture
to become established now that the Ice Age was over. The Mesolithic is
the first era of the Holocene epoch, which succeeded the Pleistocene,
and it ushered in a new approach to Stone
Age art: for example, with the arrival of a warmer climate, cave
art starts to disappear as rock art takes
to the open air. [Note in passing the Coa
Valley Engravings (22,000 BCE), the one major exception to the rule
that Paleolithic engravings were only done in caves.] Also, the need for
mobiliary art is gradually reduced and
domestic crafts become more important.

To put the Mesolithic into context, the
two defining periods of the Stone Age were the Paleolithic and the Neolithic
era (meaning "Old Stone Age" and "new Stone Age",
respectively). Paleolithic man was a hunter-gatherer who followed the
herds of reindeer and other game animals in a continuous quest for food.
During the Upper Paleolithic his existence was far more cloistered in
Europe due to the Ice Age. As a result, he practiced portable forms of
prehistoric art, such as ivory
carving, or (in certain areas) cave painting
and other forms of parietal art. In contrast,
Neolithic man generally lived in settlements, cultivated crops, domesticated
animals and practiced agriculture. As a result, he developed ancient
pottery and other forms of ceramic art
(but see the astonishing Xianrendong
Cave Pottery which pushes back the invention of pottery to 18,000
BCE) as well as early forms of megalithic art, associated with burials
and other religious rituals peculiar to more settled, organized communities.

But hunter-gatherers don't transform themselves
into settled farmers overnight. So in-between these two defining eras
we find an elastic third period which acts as a bridge between them. This
third period is called the Mesolithic ("Middle Stone Age").
It begins at the end of the Ice Age - roughly 10,000 BCE - and ends with
the arrival of agriculture. It is elastic because different areas of the
world developed agriculture at different times: Northern and Western Europe,
for example, were greatly affected by the Ice Age and consequently became
an agricultural society some 4,000 years after the Middle East. The northern
European Mesolithic is therefore much longer than its Middle Eastern cousin.

Mesolithic
Chronology

 In North/Western Europe, the Mesolithic
lasted from 10,000 to 4,000 BCE
 In Central Europe, it lasted from 10,000 to 5,500 BCE
 In East Asia, it lasted from 10,000 to 6,000 BCE
 In Southeast Europe, it lasted from 10,000 to 7,000 BCE
 In the Middle East and elsewhere, it lasted from 10,000 to 8,000
BCE

NOTE: Dates are given as a rough guide
only, as disagreement persists as to classification and chronology.
Some scholars, for instance, only use the term "Mesolithic"
to refer to northwestern Europe. Some archeologists call the non-European
Mesolithic "Epipaleolithic". For more dates, see: Prehistoric
Art Timeline.

Characteristics
of Mesolithic Art

Rock Paintings

First, due to the warmer climate, Mesolithic
rock art moves from caves to outdoor sites such as vertical cliffs or
sheer faces of natural rock, often protected from the elements by outcroppings
or overhangs. These Mesolithic rock paintings have been discovered in
numerous locations across Spain, Asia, Africa, Australasia and the Americas.
The largest grouping of this ancient art
can be found in eastern Spain, while other famous examples are listed
in chronological order below:

Another characteristic of Mesolithic rock
painting concerned subject matter. Whereas Paleolithic cave paintings
and engravings mostly depicted animals, Mesolithic painters and engravers
tended to focus on humans - usually groups of humans engaged in hunting,
dancing and various other rituals, as well as everyday activities. The
painting technique varied - both in the painting tools adopted (feathers,
reeds, pads/brushes) and the colour
pigments used: for more, see: Prehistoric
colour palette - but generally representation was non-naturalistic
and highly stylized. The humans looked more like stick-figures or matchstick
men. In fact, many of the men and women in Mesolithic rock paintings look
more like pictographs or petrograms than
pictures. Other figures seen in Mesolithic tribal
art include various anthropomorphic hybrid figures, as well as X-ray
style figures characteristic of aboriginal
rock art of the late Stone Age. For more, see the pictographs among
Ubirr Rock Art (c.30,000 BCE but unconfirmed)
and Kimberley Rock Art (c.30,000
BCE also unconfirmed).

Mesolithic
Cave Painting

Not all Mesolithic rock paintings and petroglyphs
were executed at open air sites. Artists continued to decorate caves that
provided essential shelter or were established places of residence. The
Mesolithic rock engravings at Wonderwerk
Cave (8,200 BCE), for example, were done in a cave that had been inhabited
by humans for some 2 million years. The stencilled hand paintings (8,000
BCE) in the Kalimantan Caves and Gua Ham Masri II Cave (8,000 BCE) in
Indonesia, were created in rock shelters in the middle of inhospitable
jungle terrain. Note also the Fern Cave hand stencils (from 10,000 BCE)
in North Queensland, Australia. See also: Oceanic
Art.

The Mesolithic era also featured plastic
art, although the Paleolithic liking for Venus
figurines was not maintained. Mesolithic artists tended to produce
mainly relief sculpture, such as
the animal reliefs at Gobekli Tepe, although they also carved a small
amount of free standing sculpture, like the anthropomorphic figurines
discovered at Nevali Cori and Gobekli Tepe, dating to the eighth and ninth
millennia BCE. In addition it seems likely that, with the regrowth of
forests across Europe after the Ice Age, wood
carving was also practiced widely - see, in particular, the delicate
Shigir Idol (7,500 BCE, Yekaterinburg Museum,
Middle Urals, Russia) - although few exemplars have survived.

Mesolithic Decorative
Crafts

As the number and size of Mesolithic settlements
began to grow, so did the demand for personal and domestic decorative
art, including adornments like bracelets and necklaces, as well as
decorative engravings on functional objects like paddles and weapons.
Ceramic art was also developed, notably by the Jomon culture - the first
highpoint of Japanese Art
- whose sophisticated pots have been dated to the 11th millennium BCE.
Their clay vessels were decorated with patterns made by impressing the
wet clay body with cord and sticks. Chinese
pottery, fired on bonfires and decorated by stamping, was also a feature
of the period at Xianrendong in Jiangxi province, and at other sites along
the Yellow and Yangtze river valleys. It is also fair to assume that both
face painting and body
painting continued to be practiced.

Architecture
and Megalithic Art

Perhaps the most important and defining
archeological discovery of the Mesolithic age, is the monumental temple
complex of Gobekli Tepe, situated on a
ridge near the town of Sanliurfa in Southeastern Turkey. Carbon-dated
to about 9,500 BCE, Gobekli Tepe is believed to have been a religious
centre or sanctuary serving a prosperous, well-organized settlement (or
series of settlements), as evidenced by its diverse range of megalithic
art, as well as the large number of megaliths
used in the construction of its shrines (c.9500-7500 BCE). Up until its
excavation in the 1990s, experts believed that only properly settled farming
communities were capable of building a monumental complex like Gobekli
Tepe.

At any rate, Gobekli Tepe contains the
oldest art involving stone structures, including
numerous reliefs of animals such as wild boars, bulls, foxes, lions, gazelles,
vultures and reptiles, as well as a quantity of pictographs and petrograms.
Human imagery is scant, though it includes a striking relief sculpture
of a nude female.

A similar Mesolithic sanctuary was discovered
at Nevali Cori, also in Sanliurfa Province. Carbon-dated to 9,000 BCE,
this stone temple and shrine complex also contained a large amount of
stone sculpture, including numerous
statues, a larger than life-size
human head, and a carved statue of a bird. Several hundred 2-inch-high
human figurines, made from fired clay were also unearthed, along with
a number of anthropomorphic limestone figures which are believed to be
the earliest known life-size sculptures.

Together with Nevali Cori, Gobekli Tepe
has revolutionised archeological and anthropological understanding of
the Middle Eastern Mesolithic. It demonstrates that the construction of
a monumental complex was within the capability of a hunter-gatherer society,
although scientists do not yet understand exactly how its builders managed
to mobilize and feed a force large enough to complete the project. It's
worth noting, for instance, that during the first two phases of construction,
over two hundred large pillars, each weighing up to 20 tons, were erected
and topped with huge limestone slabs. No other hunter-gatherer society
has been able to match this feat.